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Comment by doctorhandshake | Hacker News Reader

In my line of work, clients are often looking for something new - something that hasn’t been done before or is at least substantially novel in important ways. I’ve noticed that the difference between neophytes and experts in my biz is that amateurs say ‘I’ve never done that before but how hard could it be?’, whereas experts say ‘I’ve never done that before but I assume it’s full of unknowns and traps.’

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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." ~ G.B. Shaw

To make progress, you have to keep the optimism of a neophyte.

When going about the unreasonable, I tend to ask myself 3 questions:

1. Has this area recently been unlocked by progress elsewhere? e.g. ML with cheap GPUs

2. Have I built skills that make me uniquely suited to tackle this?

3. Is this problem relatively unsexy? Everyone wants to build a better javascript framework, no one wants to wear the pager.

I find the most promising areas to be unlocked when I can answer yes to all three things.

There's something like this as well in academia or at least science: because only successful studies get published (the file drawer problem), it's easy for someone who's read a lot of papers but not gotten their hands dirty yet to think that a technique is much easier and less failure prone than it actually is. Of course it's necessary to try new things and every so often they succeed, but if there are 50 papers on some system and none of them have been able to answer a question that seems obviously important, there's probably a reason why. I realized this too late and am now dealing with the consequences as a senior grad student.

Soon-to-be grad student here. Could you expand a bit? Is there anything you recommend doing ahead of time to weed out some of these tarpits, or is the already mentioned heuristic the best we've got so far?

I think the best way is to seek out the advice of people familiar with what you're trying to do and learn from their past mistakes/take their thoughts on what is a good it bad idea very seriously. My main problem was that I was branching out into techniques that neither my advisor nor any of his collaborators was familiar with. I underestimated the importance of talking to and learning directly from the people who know how to do it. Later I tried to make contact with some of those people, but had limited success because they are protective of their time and expertise (though if you're lucky you might find someone who's unusually generous).

Solid, actionable advice. Thank you, and good luck!

> I’ve never done that before but how hard could it be

Funny, the founders of a lot of successful startups usually tell an anecdote similar to this. They will often undertake a challenge, naively thinking that it’s easy only to find out how colossal actually is. Then this becomes their moat or differentiator.

Sounds like survivorship bias.

How so? Moat by definition is something hard to do, its only normal for many to fail trying.

Naiveté can be a factor which would amplify number of people trying.

"We did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it was going to be easy."

I mean yes ? In that Startups mostly fail, so the ones that survive are survivors ?

I’m not sure who has the bias in this case.

The startup ? The parent comment ?

An expert can also say, "I've never done that before, but I did this other thing, and if we adapt your requirements like this, we can derisk the problem by applying part of the previous solution".

By definition your expert is not an expert.

An expert would have a pretty decent idea how and what kind of pitfalls to prepare for, even if the specifics are largely undefined.

Otherwise your expert is simply a neophyte on this context, even if possibly with more transferrable experience in the more general sense.

I see what you mean but as I mentioned, my business is the business of doing things that haven’t been done before. You might attempt to argue that there is no way to be an expert in this line of work but you’re getting into philosophy at that point.

I always say ‘I’ve never done that before but how hard could it be?’. I've been doing it for 30 years, and it's resulted in so many products and so much expertise.

And crucially, so many things that were supposed to be impossible...

The true expert is the one who can say "yeah we've done something like that before, here's what's going to be the hardest part".

This is perhaps why MBAs tend to me more successful than PhDs. MBAs don't know stuff deeply enough to be encumbered with a priori skepticism. They just execute.

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